Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Is There a Place For Creativity, Fun and Games in Market Research?

When you think of creativity, fun and games, I'm willing to bet that "market research" isn't the first phrase that comes to mind. But not if you're Betty Adamou, the editor of Survey Analytics newest blog, GameAccess.

Betty is the CEO of Research Through Gaming. When she's not speaking or writing on the topic of gamification, she's developing game mechanics that help respondents have a better experience taking surveys.

I don't know much about Gamification besides what I'd read in the book Reality is Broken, so I was eager to see what I could learn from Betty on the topic. I'd read some of her posts and found them really interesting and informative and I wanted to see what else I could learn from her.

Gamification was new to Betty too. Well, it's new to most people, but after Betty did some research on the topic for a research paper that she later presented at the CASRO conference, she knew that she had found a deep connection between two disparate interests in her life; artistic design and research.

In what ways do you see gameification or research games for industrial applications of research?

50% of CEOs play games on their devices – CEOs take time to stop and play a game and games are a top genre from the app store – it’s 30% of all downloads are games. They like having little breaks to engage in something else. If you put those two together you should have a winning formula.

What do you see as the future of gamification?

It (gamification) will supercede TV advertising – it’s two way. No one is making you play these games, and that it’s free and you have to pay for it – it’s all voluntary. It shows that your consumers are engaged with you. And you don’t have to target demographics, they are doing all this for you.

Consumers want to talk and have interactions – brands that don’t take on gameification, their businesses are going to suffer. The smaller your business is, the more you have to do this stuff. If you’re small business, you’re competing with the big guys and if they have all the money sitting there and they aren’t doing it – the companies that are doing it will look like they understand their business more.

So, if you talk to Betty, you'll see that there is definitely a place for fun and games in the world of market research. In fact, there is not only room for it, but a requirement to engage respondents on their own terms.